


Necklace of Time

by alphaparrot



Series: The Necklace of Fate [2]
Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Clover figures it out, Dimension Travel, Fair Game Effect, M/M, Multiverse, Trousers of Time, day 2: scars/starlight, fairgameweekend2020, sensory horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:08:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26804143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alphaparrot/pseuds/alphaparrot
Summary: Three years ago, Raven and Qrow Branwen disappeared. Clover finally has an opportunity to go after them. He never could have imagined though what the journey would be like...
Relationships: Qrow Branwen/Clover Ebi
Series: The Necklace of Fate [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1952527
Comments: 9
Kudos: 19





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my Day 2 submission for Fair Game Weekend--Scars/Starlight! It *should* be possible to read this fic and enjoy it without having read Part 1, but I hope you do read Part 1--it is after all the direct prequel to this fic.
> 
> My deep gratitude as always to [delta_altair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/delta_altair) and [thedarkpoet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedarkpoet) for your feedback, as well as to the entire Fair Game Effect server for all your wonderful support.

_ Kingfisher _ shot out of the launch tube, and into the open space between Atlas Station and the  _ Akademiya _ . Clover twirled with joy, relishing the feels of the controls, the soft puffs of the thrusters, and the smooth-as-butter response of the flaps and actuators as he moved. Today was the day--he was sure of it. Today was the day he would get Qrow back--and knowing that, and being out here in his ship--he felt alive.

A few thousand klicks away, the rift Raven had torn in the universe snaked across the sky. Long, sinuous red tendrils hung unmoving against the stars, a massive scar that was the only indication that the universe they lived in had an underlying fabric that could be damaged. Everyone knew of course that this was the case; the Folding Device on every large ship relied on that fact. Interstellar travel throughout the Federatsiya was only possible by folding the universe on itself, and poking a small, temporary hole. It was just that you didn’t usually get visual reminders of this part of reality.

Until Raven Branwen had pushed an overheated experimental Folding Device to its limits and permanently shredded the local universe, disappearing through the gash along with Qrow, her twin brother and the most important person in Clover’s life. Clover knew why she had done it--it had seemed like the only way to escape certain death in a battle against the Grimm fleet, in which they had all been hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. The move had taken Qrow and Raven from the known world--no scanner in all of the Remnant had detected  _ Harbinger _ and  _ Omen _ in the intervening three years--but it had also destroyed the Grimm fleet, as the red tendrils churned through local space, warping, distorting, and destroying anything they touched. Clover still didn’t know if things could have turned out differently in a way that resulted in victory. He had agonized over that question through many sleepless nights. But now, none of that mattered.

He had worked for three years for this opportunity, had sacrificed sleep and sanity for even the slimmest chance that he might see Qrow again. Everyone had--Qrow and Raven were well-liked within the Fleet, and renowned for their prowess as pilots. But Clover, more than anyone, had devoted himself to finding them, and bringing them back. 

As Clover coasted toward the rift, the stars behind it drifted across the tendrils. Their light flared, distorted, and winked out as the tendrils passed between them and Clover, and then reappeared again on the other side. Dr. Pietro Polendina’s scientists had concluded that not only did spacetime warp in extreme ways in the vicinity of the tendrils, but the number of dimensions the universe possessed began to fluctuate there as well. Light’s behavior became unpredictable, and all physical laws and principles that held solid objects together ceased to matter, resulting in wholesale destruction. Furthermore, the presence of matter in that broken space tended to destabilize the rift, causing it to grow. This was why the rift was now over a hundred klicks in diameter--it had swallowed much of the Grimm fleet, as well as Salem’s flagship. When it had run out of material, it had stopped. The rift had only grown twice since that battle, each time when a science team had accidentally placed a dimensional probe too close to a rift tendril. Atlas and Mantle Stations had however been moved further away than the meager hundred klicks that initially separated them from the rift, as a safety precaution.

Clover’s heart beat loudly in his ears as his ship approached. The rift seemed so unimaginably enormous at this close distance. It was a giant, red wound in spacetime, and yet he knew this was an infinitesimally tiny scratch. Raven had done no real damage to their universe; just to this tiny little corner. Her Folding Device after all had been stripped down, modified, refitted into a smaller configuration, and hooked up to a power source many orders of magnitude weaker than those found on actual interstellar ships. And yet the device had unleashed destruction of such enormity, that this scar dwarfed  _ Kingfisher _ .

Clover felt tiny. For the first time in his life, he really felt that he had comprehended the scale of the universe, seeing this structure in space so large that he could barely see either end, and knowing that it was so minor that if the universe had auditors, this likely would never show up in the accounting. Clover was nothing--an insignificant speck, a mote of dust among the stars. 

And yet.

And yet Clover was about to go into this rift, to travel into the unknown, and tell the universe that it could not keep Qrow from him. Whatever eldritch, interdimensional horrors lay within the rift, Clover would face them. He was, after all, one of the best fighter pilots in the galaxy.

A constellation of large, bulky probes stationed near the tendrils came to life as _Kingfisher_ approached, their Dust cores beginning to glow as their systems came online. They were accompanied in Clover’s visual overlay by brief diagnostics, indicating that each probe was fully functional. Once Clover was close enough, they would activate, stimulating the dimensional chaos within the tendrils, and forcing the rift open wider. At the same time, they would emit a counterbalancing field that Dr. Polendina, his scientists, and Ruby believed would prevent the tendrils from growing and devouring anything else in the system. Clover’s own ship would then need to divert power to the Branwen Folding Device, which would translate the ship’s geometry into the alien topologies of the portal as he passed through, in theory keeping him and his ship safe and intact, rather than scrambling the positions of every atom in his body.

“This is  _ Kingfisher _ , on final approach to the rift,” Clover said into the comm.

“Copy that,  _ Kingfisher _ , you are go for approach,” Penny replied. “The gates are armed and ready; you may proceed whenever you are ready.”

“Roger that, Penny,” Clover said. “Keep everyone safe while I’m gone.”

“I’ll do that, sir. Over,” Penny responded.

“ _ Kingfisher? _ ” said a new voice in his ear. Clover recognized it from newsreels--it was the Chairman of the Federatsiya. “This is Chairman Ozpin,” the voice continued, “watching from Atlas Station. We are on a private channel at the moment; this is just between us. I just wanted to say that I am proud of what you are doing today--what you have already done. 

“You may be feeling a great deal of fear right now, Captain Clover Ebi. I know I would be--fear is natural. It is the one quality that is common to all living things. Fear of physical dangers, that may hurt us. Fear of making mistakes. The fear of letting someone get close to us--and then the fear of losing them. The fear of the unknown. But I think, Captain Ebi, that what matters more than what you fear, is who you choose to be in the face of that fear.

“Captain Ebi, I speak for all of us here when I say that if there is a single person in the Federatsiya who is qualified for this mission, it is you. The captain who risked his own life against an unknown adversary to save a pilot he had just met. The man who befriended that pilot, and forged what I am told was an uncommonly close bond. The leader who sprang to action when Salem arrived with her fleet, despite the near certainty of catastrophic loss. The person who, when what he loved most had been taken away from him, refused.

“Yes, Captain, I know all about your behavior after Qrow Branwen and Raven Branwen disappeared. I know my best psychologist nearly resigned his position because of you. But while some saw you as a troublesome nuisance, I saw you spit in the face of fate, and refuse to accept that Raven and Qrow could simply be gone. Because of you, they may yet return to us. And even now, having done so much--you once again put your life on the line. 

“We know not what lies beyond that scar in the starlight. But your resilience, your determination in the face of your fear, gives me hope. Because the one thing that is stronger than fear, is love. Godspeed, Captain Ebi. May you return to us safely, and soon.”

With a click, the comm channel closed. Clover blinked, clearing the tears from his eyes. The Chairman was right. This was scary. But he could do this. He had to. For Qrow. For the man he loved. That was the most important thing.

Clover pushed open the throttle, and  _ Kingfisher _ accelerated into the arms of the rift.

The probes that would act as Clover’s gate flashed brightly as he passed them, brilliant white light arcing from their conduits into the tendrils of the rift. Thin filaments of light branched out along the tendrils, flickering through every colour in the rainbow as the broken geometry of the rift distorted the light. The tendrils themselves began to pulse and glow brighter, the dull red of the scar growing brighter and more saturated, revealing more shades and hues of red than Clover had thought possible--all the way from a red so dark it must have been black--except that his mind screamed ‘red’ at him--to a red so bright it threatened to blind him. 

Clover began spooling the Branwen Folding Device. He would not need to activate it in order to jump, as one usually did--the portal was already here. But it needed stored power to connect with the topological flow of the rift.

As  _ Kingfisher _ ’s prow closed the final few metres to the heart of the rift, where Qrow and Raven had vanished three years ago, the tendrils seemed to grow wider, and the heart opened wide, in a great yawning chasm that at once seemed to have no discernable depth, and yet also an incomprehensibly infinite depth. Clover noted, though, that the rift did not actually appear to be growing--as it spread open like a cosmological flower, he saw that the stars in the spaces between the arms of the rift appeared to peel away--as if he were simply entering a space which was larger than had been apparent a moment ago. 

_ Kingfisher  _ plunged into the rift, Clover opened the conduits to the Branwen Folding Device, and every sense he had of direction, topology, or reality ceased to exist.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clover dives into the rift, and his mind is undone and then remade as he searches for Qrow and Raven.

Clover’s world broke into a million pieces, the front of his ship folding away like the wings of a thousand paper cranes, each facet shimmering with the reflection of every single other facet. He tried to look to his side, but found he was looking at himself, and then at a dozen copies of himself, all looking in different directions. Each reflection divided, and then divided again, and then folded through itself and turned inside out, then folded through each of its neighbors, in a hundred thousand branching, swirling spirals of madness. He tried to look down at himself, to make sure he was still there, but when he tried to look down, he felt a plunging feeling in his gut, as the world turned inside-out again. A hurricane of colours assaulted his eyes, and Clover felt the urge to vomit--but his body seemed not to have any connection to its physiology anymore, and all Clover was left with was an uneasily discordant sensation in his mind. 

The fractalizing shapes, colors, and reflections swirled and churned and bubbled faster and faster, and Clover felt his heart race, or at least he felt a sensation that seemed like it might have been a heart racing, somewhere else, in a different life, as the rift seemed to race past him at ever-increasing speed. 

Clover tried to scream, but no sound came out. He tried again, and his senses flooded with pain, like an undulating wave of sandpaper racing across his skin. He tried to flex his fingers, but with every impulse, instead of sensation, thrumming dissonant notes filled the air. Fear built inside Clover, as all his senses seemed to fall apart--he saw smells, and every increasingly psychedelic vision flooded him with taste. 

Had they gotten the equations wrong? Had they missed something, in their zeal to dive into this dimensional madness? They couldn’t possibly have anticipated this. The stabilization fields had failed; Clover was sure of it. His ship was being destroyed, and he would be shredded into nothingness any moment now.

Clover closed his eyes and tried to focus on himself, tried to isolate his identity from the blender of reality that was his senses. He was Clover. He had been born in Mantle. He lived in Atlas. He served in the Atlas military. He was Ironwood’s trusted subordinate. He was Qrow’s friend. He was the leader of the Ace-Ops. Clover thought back to his memories as a small boy, and then as a teenager. He focused on all the missions he had completed with the Ace-Ops, and his years with Qrow. And he remembered… his older years? He found he had memories of his reflexes slowing, and his retirement from the Fleet--then several years as a flight instructor in the Academy. He remembered peaceful years in a large home, on a hillside overlooking a body of water on a sunny planet--and an old man next to him, with thinning silver-grey hair, and bright red eyes that had never lost their vigour. 

Clover opened his eyes, and saw his past and future stretching away from him, a glittering temporal chain that coiled and knotted around itself, with his present the warm, glowing center that dragged the rest of the timeline through the rift. It seemed at once both alien, and yet undeniably familiar. This was him, in his entirety. And Qrow was in his future. That certainty filled Clover with hope, and determination. He was not going to die here. His life wasn’t flashing before his eyes; he was merely  _ seeing _ his life. And he was going to find and rescue Qrow. 

_ Kingfisher _ raced ahead, Clover’s coiled timeline shimmering and squirming in the temporal flow. Clover risked glancing out around him, and lost sight of the timeline that was his life. He desperately tried to focus, and find it. He remembered….

He remembered rolling through a hail of plasma fire, diving towards Qrow’s ailing ship.

He remembered cleaning a wound on Qrow’s bare back, noticing two long scars where wings had been. Clover shook his head, or tried to. He was sure he had not seen anything of the sort; he had never cleaned Qrow’s wounds, and  _ Harbinger _ ’s wings were a part of the ship, not of Qrow. But the memory was his, indelibly so. 

He remembered swinging through the air, a large green, shimmering bird flying alongside him as they looked together for their target.

He remembered a giant, floating city high above a planet’s surface, and a...fishing pole?...rising to block the downward swing of a wide, flat blade, wielded by...Qrow? What life was he remembering?

He tried again. He remembered bringing his weapon up to block a strike, this time not a fishing rod, but a...steel greatsword, Wolves with shining red eyes surrounded him in a forest, and Qrow was injured behind him. Ahead of him, a woman with red eyes rushed forward at him, a broadsword in her hands tipping downward as she ran. 

Clover dodged as the sword sailed through the air, narrowly avoiding it, and saw a man with a silver tail that ended in a bulbous, purple stinger, and the face of Tyrian Callows. Clover’s feet crunched on the snow beneath him as he scrambled for purchase. A purple glow spread over Tyrian’s hand, while behind him, an injured Qrow struggled to lift himself with one arm. Except this Qrow was not dressed like the Qrow that Clover knew. Gone was the slim black-and-red flight uniform--this Qrow wore a gray waistcoat, and had a red cape.

Clover tried to focus as this wrong Tyrian stepped forward to attack, feeling  _ Kingfisher _ ’s heft in his hand, its spool primed, the razor-sharp steel hook ready to fly. He hesitated; this was wrong--this was not a memory he had. He closed his eyes.

He remembered a cold, icy expanse--and the ruins of a stone tower slowly crumbling and collapsing, as Qrow stood at his side.

A memory from when he was younger--his captain stepping toward him, hands balled into fists and ready to strike. He closed his hand around  _ Kingfisher _ , the spear familiar, eager in his hand.

_ No. _

_ Kingfisher _ was a ship, not a hand-held weapon. He repeated this fact to himself, eyes shut, over and over.

He opened his eyes, and salty water sprayed over  _ Kingfisher _ ’s wooden prow, her sails billowing. Cannonfire splashed into the seas around the ship, and wood crunched under the force of the primitive lead weapons, as his soldiers prepared for the pirates to board. 

Clover squeezed his eyes shut again, and opened them to see Qrow kneeling over a broad, silvered sword, held over a fire. Sandwiches were grilling gently on its blade. His tail wagged gently. He blinked.

He had to focus on the good memories he had with Qrow, his real memories. Card games. He had played cards with Qrow. He remembered….he remembered a card game in a vehicle...a truck. A winked compliment to his companion. That….didn’t feel wrong. He focused intently on the feel of that memory, the familiar warmth.

A small, black bird, nestled in a pile of clothing.

Standing together in the snow on a cold clear night, next to an emergency hut--gazing up at a million stars twinkling overhead.

A dance--leather shoes moving quickly across a wooden dance floor, in a dimly-lit, smoke-filled tavern. He spun away from his partner, and then back in.

Qrow deftly lowered Clover into a dip, the ornate ceiling of the brightly-lit ballroom high above them--and Qrow in a black, delicate dress, all elegant lace, velvet, and sheer mesh. Clover’s mouth went dry as his partner held him. 

Clover gasped, and blinked. When he opened them, he was at a piano, his fingers flying nimbly across the keyboard, as Qrow looked on, adoration in his eyes. Then his hands were drawing a bow across the strings of a large instrument, as Qrow swayed with a smaller, similar instrument. He blinked again, and they were sharing bowls of noodles in a small shop. Again--small rolls of rice and fish--and again, and now they were bonding over coffee.

Then Qrow was kissing him passionately, his back to a brick wall, outside in a dimly-lit city. Then Qrow was kissing him in a tent, and then in a bed. Clover’s sight raced through the memories--a million memories, a million lifetimes of Qrow at his side, sharing touches, hugs, kisses, beds. 

Clover understood. A million different lifetimes. A million different worlds. In every timeline, in every life. 

Qrow.

He and Qrow.

Together.

An infinity of twisting, roping, braiding timelines stretched away from him, undulating in the cosmological torrent. And he was free to move among them, to see the endless happiness, and the fear, and the grief. A million timelines in which their time together was all too short. Timeline after timeline where both met each other already as broken men, with unspeakable traumas in their pasts, and yet found healing in each other. Worlds in which those worlds’ fates hung in the balance, their actions liable to be the difference between joy and tragedy. Other timelines in which they met while much younger, or led normal lives, free of the fear of catastrophe. His timeline, that he had come from, the Federatsiya, was here somewhere, coiled in the temporal mass. 

Yet….was it his? He knew that in truth, these were all his. They were all him, just different facets of the same truth. The same being--a being that transcended the flimsy walls of a single universe, and had entwined itself inextricably with another such being--Qrow. And in fact was only one strand in a grand cosmogenical tapestry of causality and fate, whose strands were the transdimensional lives of all people, all weaving, intersecting, braiding, and entwining with each other.

But one filament of one thread had jumped its tracks, had dared to break the bounds of reality. And it had done so in pursuit of two other filaments that had also dared such a departure. That needed to be rectified; the tapestry had to be whole.

As the quilt of creation flowed around him, Clover looked for signs of the missing filaments.

There--a disturbance: a wrinkle. There should have been no wrinkles. He moved towards it, bringing the disturbance into focus. The wrinkle spread turbulently through the fabric, growing in severity as he followed it. And then it appeared to branch into two wrinkles. He followed one branch, peering closely into its emotional tenor. Ten thousand, and then a thousand, and then a hundred lifetimes, replete with moments with Raven--but no Qrow. Qrow was missing from these timelines. Puzzled, Clover followed the threads--but as he followed, he found that the turbulence of the wrinkle eased, and the fabric gradually returned to its smooth state. He had lost the trail. He re-traced his path, following the ripples and wakes of the Raven-shaped disturbance. There--the fork, once more. He followed the other branch this time.

This time, the disturbance grew ever more turbulent, as if something had torn carelessly through the fabric. These timelines were filled with Qrow’s imprint, and Raven’s was absent. Many seemed to have been destroyed--threads that were frayed and torn, some which bore charred ends. He pushed with increasing urgency through the destruction--and then he saw it. 

A single thread, which looped away from all the others, suffused with red and black filaments. And in this thread, there was no Clover. This had to have been it--a world in which Qrow did not belong, into which he had emerged from the torrent. Clover hesitated. Raven was not in this world. If he committed to this timeline, he would not return with Raven, not without mounting a second rescue attempt. But her branch had seemed impossible to follow--and he had an opportunity to be reunited with Qrow. He knew he had no choice.

Clover pushed all thoughts of the other timelines out of his consciousness, and allowed this errant thread to fill his mind. He dove in.

The flow coalesced around Clover, and then he had arms and legs and organs once more. The walls of the rift raced past, the winding tunnel of time twisting ahead of him. He nimbly rolled and weaved, the thrusters and flaps of his ship responding to his motions as the arcane geometry flew past him. He was in his ship once more,  _ Kingfisher _ ’s shining hull stretching ahead of him, her smooth glass above him. 

Clover’s heart raced, and his blood pounded in his ears. Yes. Yes. He could do it. He was almost out. He was coming for Qrow.

Qrow. 

He would be there soon.

_ Kingfisher _ barreled around a sharp bend, and a divine white light flooded the cockpit. The walls of the rift widened ahead in the distance, disappearing into a suffuse, blindingly bright celestial glow. Clover squinted against the light, and raced forward. 

_ Kingfisher _ plunged in, and the white, warm, searing light burned through every blood vessel, every neural pathway, every cell of his body.

And then he was out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! The adventure meets its conclusion in Part 3!
> 
> This fic references a large number of other works, some explicitly, and some obliquely. In the order in which they appear in this chapter, they are:  
> ["On Wings of Trust, We Fly", by Chiherah](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24480526)  
> ["The Downbelow", by me](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1923118)  
> The canon RWBY universe  
> ["One for Sorrow", by thedarkpoet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22850197/chapters/54613171)  
> ["Trust Love", by delta_altair](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23236687/chapters/55637161)  
> ["Frozen Nightmares and Guarded Confessions", by delta_altair](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23865172)  
> ["No Pretense", by Renabe](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26786314)  
> ["Enemies to Husbands Speedrun", by the Fair Game Effect Nonsense Writers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25280815/chapters/61291600)  
> ["Freedom", by synvamp](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25833148/chapters/62759032)  
> ["Impressions of Teeth", by Agent_24](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23756431/chapters/57058087)  
> ["Feathers and Fluff", by Amber_Aglio](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23211931)  
> ["Stardust", by Amber_Aglio](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24416131)  
> ["Moonshine", by thedarkpoet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26782120)  
> ["Prologue - One Step Forward", by afoolforatook](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25562860)  
> ["Sonata for Two", by delta_altair](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24591361)  
> ["Sonata for Two, Encore", by delta_altair](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25473799)  
> ["Breathing Cues", by afoolforatook](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25041184/chapters/60646105)  
> ["And The Reason Comes", by whatacartouchebag](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21970195/chapters/52426102)  
> ["Of Late Night Confessions", by StoryWeaverKirea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26242927)  
> ["A Series of Almost Dates", by delta_altair](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23190297) (plus every other coffee fic written for these two)
> 
> Thank you all so much for all the wonderful stories you write! Qrow and Clover really do get to live some wonderful lives together across so many different timelines, and it's all thanks to the fandom.


End file.
